Large enterprises often face the challenge of mass distribution and deployment of network infrastructure. For example, an enterprise may operate a number of geographically distributed facilities (e.g., offices, retail outlets, and the like) that require network connectivity to a central or main office of the enterprise and optionally to each other. In such cases, a challenge arises when the enterprise desires to install or upgrade network devices with each of the many remote facilities. For example, a central information technology (IT) administrative group of the enterprise may coordinate an effort to upgrade computers, firewalls, gateways, routers, VPN appliances, switches or other network equipment in each of the remote facilities. Such operations may require deployment and activation of hundreds or sometimes thousands of devices.
To simplify the process, the enterprise may purchase similar network devices for deployment at the remote facilities in a single mass rollout. By purchasing similar if not the same network devices, the enterprise may ease administrative burdens with respect to deploying and operating these network devices. In such cases, it is common for the enterprise to contract with the manufacturer to ship the units directly to the remote facilities. This saves shipping costs and offers the advantage of alleviating the central IT group from having the burden of physically receiving and reshipping the devices. However, when devices are shipped directly from the manufacturer to the final location at which the devices are to be deployed, it may not always be possible for a trained network administrator to be physically manipulate the devices to ensure proper installation and activation. As a result, the person who configures the devices is typically a store manager or other person who does not have experience in configuring network devices. In such cases, it may be difficult to ensure that the devices are correctly deployed and activated in a manner so as to match a centralized device management system often maintained by the IT group for remotely monitoring and managing devices in the enterprise.
Conventional methods for controlling the deployment of the devices within the remote facilities rely the creation and distribution of a device-specific “configlet” for each of the network devices being activated. A configlet is software that generally includes sufficient configuration data to deploy the particular configuration device in its target environment so as to allow the corresponding device to come online and connect to the centralized device management system. In such cases, experienced administrators of the IT group create the device-specific configlets and ship storage media (e.g., USB drives) containing each of the configlets to the corresponding remote facilities to which the respective devices where shipped. To properly manage the devices and ensure consistency with the centralized device management system, the network administrators must ensure that the correct configlets are shipped to the correct remote facilities and, therefore, applied to the correct network devices.